Ask Ray | How do you find the motivation to live forever?

How do you find motivation to want to live forever? How do you find comfort in your father’s death, knowing you may never truly see him again — only an avatar of what he’d represent?

— John Hansen

John:

I have the motivation to live to tomorrow, metaphorically speaking. I think everyone has that motivation. As we get to times in the future, we’ll have more powerful tools to get to the next stage. As for the death of my father or anyone else, I don’t find it comforting, but rather I consider it a tragedy.

— Ray

Dear Ray:

I think it’s probably true to say, from my limited understanding, that it is in our biology to want to survive. We are probably naturally motivated to want to live as long as we can.

The future will probably be fantastic for people who have never experienced loss — but what about those of us who have? We will be in paradise — but what about our deceased family/friends?

How can we fully enjoy a eternal future when there will always be that human part of us that misses our loved ones?

John:

If I were to create an avatar of my father (using superintelligent AI to help me do it) based on all of the information I have about him and my and others’ memories of him, that avatar would be more like my father was (at age 58, which is how I remember him) than he would be today (at age 100), had he lived.

Ray:

“It is not demeaning to regard a person as a profound pattern (a form of knowledge), which is lost when he or she dies.”

I agree and think it possible that future AI could produce a replica that is a 99.9% clone of that person. At what stage of AI will you be satisfied with the recreation of your father?

“Death is a tragedy.”

It is a tragedy in that we seemingly no longer get to experience the universe, and our loved ones are left to experience it without us.

To try and convey my idea, consider this somewhat petty argument: if you’re going to be recreated in the future, why do you bother ‘fighting’ death? Not just because you don’t want to leave your loved ones, you enjoy living – but maybe because their is an uncertainty that there is and will only be one Ray?

We can prevent death — do you think it possible that future AI could undo it entirely? Has our understanding of time not been apart of our evolutionary process?

John:

These are some good insights and a revealing thought experiment.

I would accept a mental clone of my father if it passes a “Fredric Kurzweil Turing test,” that is when I cannot distinguish it from my father. It is a somewhat unfair test, however, in that my biological father is not here to compare to, and my memories of him have faded.

Your thought experiment reveals that we are not confident that when a future AI based avatar does pass a Fredric Kurzweil Turing test that it will represent a continuation of his identity. It will be better to scan our brains while we’re still here. My preferred scenario is to merge with AI and over time the AI portion of me will become dominant. It will be backed up and it will ultimately understand the remaining biological portion well enough to back that up as well.

Comments (19)

This goes off on a tangent from the original question, but with regard to living indefinitely I’ve often thought “What about boredom?” What do we do when we’ve done everything there is to do a million times? I suspect that this is one of the problems resulting form the singularity that we will have to solve. One possible solution might lie in a better understanding of “novelty”. If it turns out that novelty is an emotion like anger or joy, then we should be able to simulate it. We could then restore the novelty of a given experience so that it was as new, fresh and interesting as the first time we experienced it. Goodbye boredom.

Here are some more musings from my view point. Many people reject them because of credibility issues, but for me, my experiences are the driving force behind them. I come to these conclusions because they are the best way to reconcile them in my mind. Sometimes I have experienced a location that doesn’t have an observer on it. Kind of like the tree falling in a forest thought experiment. For example a room in a building that I’ve never been in. What is observing? What sensory organ is collecting the light information to give me vision? Often the perspective is from above, almost like peering into a box. Over the years, which at this point is close to forty, I’ve come to the conclusion that consciousness permeates everything. That it all is alive. Maybe a better way of stating my conclusion is that, I adhere to a very Copenhagen interpretation of the double slit screen photon expeiment. I also have a very Jungian view. That it all is part of a collective unconsciousness. One of the things that has helped me to understand is thought experiments with infinity. In a black hole there is theoretically a singularity. Me personally I think it’s an almost perfect singularity, but that it’s not 100%. it’s just really close relatively speaking. Either way it illustrates that a point in space can go inward forever. If that’s the case then between my two fingers is an infinite space. One infinity to another is identical. So every square inch of everywhere contains everything. Obviously we don’t experience that. We experience an illusion of time and space, that is created by spirit. That in a similar way to the desk top pendulum toy of steel ball just touching, if yo pull away two balls on one end, it will swing two balls on the other end, information as to the relativity of things is transferred from one infinite point to another. That the world we see is just waves on a sea of infinity. It’s hard in this context of posts to really give all the thoughts and feelings that lead me to this conclusion, it just all looks like a dream that we all are dreaming together, and when I say all I mean everything. It’s like Howard Blooms hidden time with particles talking to each other. Hidden time is the real time. Our time is a illusion of relativities. All your loved ones aren’t gone. They always existed and always will.

Some day in the future we will be able to look back in time and at the time of death of the person in question, measure all the quantum states in that brain.
Essentially copying mind and memories to the future.
Very powerful is such quantum archeology.

How do we know that some type 3 exoplanet civilization hasn’t already beaten us to this ultimate challenge?
With all those exoplante’s out there it’s hard to imagine that we are the most evolved life forms out there.

Many modern thinkers have proposed that the past and the future exist at the same time as the now. As someone who has psychic experiences I have a unique view on these theories. I have clearly seen events in the past and the future. On a couple of instances I have whatched events play out like a movie. If you live with someting like this it affects you in innumerable ways. Firstly you try to validate. I’m well past that stage. I’ve actually called people and told them what they were doing. That’s the present. I love when I see the future because that’s even more of a trip, because it begs the question. Did the future already happen? On two different occasions I have seen car accidents in front of me moments before they happened and took evasive action and successfully avoided being caught in them. For me when the vision comes I trust it voracity. All your loved ones and all their actions are there. In time we will be able to see it all. The mental states should be inducible. As for living forever. It can’t happen. Everything is finite. Your soul is infinite, but any discussion would strain credulity. You can extend your life for a very long time, but you will die at some point. I like how the Australian aborigines put it. There is real time and there is dream time, dream time is more real than real time.

Solaris is a book (and movie). It’s an artistic form of expression, sketching a future scenario so the writer can tell a story. I see no reason why it would be a likely future outcome. It’s a fabrication.

Mr. Kurzweil has charts and data on which to base his predictions. And he’s definitely not just optimistic, he discusses potential downsides as well. You should consider reading his books.

Like ray, i can see that in the future, super-intelligence will probably bring the dead back to life and make the lost, found. It will be through a means of extrapolation. With enough intelligence it is possible to extrapolate anything, anything in the universe including the universe. I’m reminded of the philosophic question, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” the answer depends on whether or not there is a super-intelligent being in the universe were the tree falls. An intelligent enough being can map the position of every atom in the universe, that includes the atoms in the fallen tree and can extrapolate backwards or forwards (in time). The original sound the tree makes is lost, however the sound can be perfectly replicated. Can you consider this perfectly replicated sound, to be the sound the tree makes as it falls? This is an interesting line of thought because surely if you consider this sound to be perfectly accurate then that would mean that time travel to the past is a distinct possibility. Just a thought.

One is reminded of the beautiful poem of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven, in which the mourning lover steps deeper and deeper into melancholy each time the bird replies “Nevermore”.

However, complete information about the deceased person might not be irremediably lost forever. It might still be around somewhere in this physical universe. We may imagine
– some kind of material field a bit like the one postulated in
Rupert Sheldrake,
Morphic resonance: The nature of formative causation
(Park Street Press, 2009)
– a static spacetime still containing the past, frozen into its fabric
– some residual remanence of all past quantum entanglements.

Alternatively, we might reach The Singularity and become all so closely linked to one another, forming a kind of Superorganism for who our present day personal tragedies would loose all their emotional significance.

At present, we only know that (at least) 96 % of the Universe escapes us and we speak of some mysterious “dark matter” and “dark energy”. And this represents only the “known unknowns”…

As long as we keep a scientific mind and continue to explore what is out there, the adventure of life and consciousness is far from over. We need to keep on looking for new paths and finding where they could lead to. The task is admittedly often difficult and sometime discouraging but not totally hopeless.

I am actually a very spiritual person and believe in the concept of life after death and other existential theories involving the existence of a soul. However, I find the one driving force for my desire to live indefinitely be that the sooner that I die the less time I have had to do everything I want in this life and I want do do an infinite number of things, most of which I don’t even know that I want to do yet. I want to do things like climb the mountains of the Moon and other planets and even visit other star systems. I want to see the world in the year 3000 and I want to enjoy every single good movie up to that point. I want to have a family and see that family grow up and not just watch my kids but my grand kids and great grand kids and great, great grandkids and so on and so fourth. The sooner you die the less you have done, even if you continue your existence in an afterlife where you would either have to start back at square one and build up your life again in the case of reincarnation or just loaf around with no drama in your life in paradise.

The big question is whether the detailed information needed to perform genuine “resurrections” can be retrieved at some point in the future, even though the brains in question have long crumbled into dust. It would require some mechanism we cannot now foresee, but the future is long and we simply don’t know what can eventually be done. Imagine how difficult it would be to foresee some of the tools WE have for examining the past, such as carbon dating, a mere 150 years ago.